Ex-NYPD Commish Ray Kelly slams Mayor Adams on crime

Former NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly slammed Mayor Eric Adams on Sunday, accusing him of dropping the ball on rampant crime in the Big Apple and insisting, “This isn’t brain surgery.

“We were the safest big city in America just a few years ago,” Kelly told host John Catsimatidis on WABC 770 AM radio’s “Cats Roundtable.”

“This isn’t brain surgery,” the former top cop said. “You go back and look at the things we were doing then and you re-implement them. But apparently, the mayor doesn’t want to do this.

“He doesn’t want to [bring back] anti-crime units, he doesn’t want to use stop and frisk.”

Kelly took particular issue with runaway subway and bus crimes in the five boroughs, saying the deployment of transit cops has to be “re-examined” by “an outside agency.”

On Saturday, Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul said they plan to flood the subways with more MTA and NYPD cops through overtime shifts, as well as add additional surveillance cameras, to try to get a handle on the soaring crime.

The city also will create new 25-bed units at two psych centers to get more mentally ill out of the underground and into proper shelter, the pols said.

The plan came days after Adams blamed the media for creating a false “perception” that city transit isn’t safe — an assertion roundly criticized.

“Every day you read about a crime in the transit system, and it just reinforces the notion that it’s too dangerous to travel on the subway,” Kelly said.

“I think they need a fresh look at the transit system because we know the subways are the lifeblood of New York,” he said. “People are still not going to get on them.”

New York City subway crime has run rampant this year, with nine subway system homicides so far and a 39% leap in violent crime in the system as of August compared to 2019, stats show.

Kelly served as police commissioner in the early 1990s before moving on to several federal posts in customs enforcement and anti-terrorism assignments under then-President Bill Clinton.

In the mid-1990s he headed up a task force to quell unrest in Haiti — and he addressed the continued unstable state of that country on Sunday’s radio show.

“Haiti is a basket base,” Kelly told Catsimatidis. “It’s the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, if not the world. They have no functioning government.”

He said the United Nations “is going to be the main vehicle to help Haiti.

“Everything moves slower as far as Haiti is concerned,” he added. “They are in a very, very bad way.”